How can brands prepare for this year’s innovations?
After a major acceleration due to the pandemic, many retailers felt a slowdown in the growth of online sales in the world in 2022 and 2023. Despite this, it is estimated that e-commerce will continue to grow and the projected turnover in Brazil for 2024 is R$205 billion, according to the Brazilian Association of Electronic Commerce (ABComm). This represents an increase of 10% compared to the sales forecast for 2023.
Although the projection is for growth, the new privacy scenario increases the challenge for marketing to connect brands and consumers, requiring the adoption of new technological solutions and internal processes to adapt to reality in an increasingly competitive environment.
Mariana Fleury, Business Analytics Manager at DP6, a technology and marketing intelligence, analytics and data science consultancy, chatted with Leonardo Naressi, Innovation Director and Co-CEO & CIO at DP6, and here are the main trends for the Data Analytics market in 2024. Check them out:
1- Gen AI: the power of automation and the democratization of data
We couldn’t start an article on trends without talking about Gen AI (or generative artificial intelligence). A little over a year ago, Open AI’s ChatGPT was launched, which accelerated the race for Artificial Intelligence, and fell out of favor with the public — with around 100 million weekly users — bringing up many controversial questions about the use of technology. But beyond chat, the fact is that generative intelligence is here to shake things up.
“When we look through the lens of Digital Marketing, there is a lot of talk about the immediate impact on content, creation, personalization and the gain in productivity with automation, which is what is currently gaining the spotlight. But there is another side, which ends up behind the scenes, which is the impact on Data Analytics, using the power of Generative AI to understand what we want and democratize access to data for all areas of companies.” — explains Naressi.
To work with Data Analytics, it is essential to know how to ask questions, evaluate and process data, so that we can generate relevant and actionable insights for our clients and stakeholders. And these language assistants make work more agile and often supplement the need for an increasingly large technical team.
Whether it’s to make a query in SQL (today we can already ask in natural language for reports in Power BI and, with some integration, request data for BigQuery bases), or to generate reports, recommend segments and audiences (GA4 already does this), or even to process sentiment analysis without having to spend days training a text mining model. These are just a few examples of how Big Tech and the area of technology and data are using AI.
Of course, you need to be careful, know how to ask, refine and validate in order to get the best results, but without a doubt, this is a disruptive technology that is transforming the work process and promises to reinvent companies in the coming years.
2- First Party Data and the reign of proprietary data
The focus on privacy has meant that in recent years first party data (or primary data) has gained prominence, and here it is important to point out that it opens the door to a series of other trends, as we will report below.
With the promise of the end of third-party cookies, announced in 2021 by Google and finally launched in the first week of January 2024, brands have understood that they need to use their own signals/data as a competitive differentiator and, in order to do so, they need to invest in the evolution of the collection and better management of this data. In addition, in this new scenario, many of the decisions that companies will make will not be based solely on observed behavior, because eventually some data may not be collected, and then it is up to the business areas to become familiar with insights from sampling or advanced modeling.
Today, solutions such as Google Analytics and Google’s campaign management tools, for example, already feature the concept of Modeled Conversion, Google’s response to this new cookieless scenario, with tools that are better prepared to generate relevant insights, even when some users’ data is not collected for privacy reasons. It’s worth remembering that we will soon see the end of Google Analytics Universal 360, scheduled for July 2024, and the need to migrate definitively to Google Analytics 4, which enables the advanced use of data in this new “privacy first” scenario in the Google ecosystem.
So it’s no wonder that the search for more governance, organization, integration and use of proprietary data (CDP, CRM, Data Warehouse, Data Lake) to generate insights, audience activations and message personalization has been a trend in recent years, and should accelerate even further in the coming years.
3- Retail Media and the third wave of digital advertising
With first party data in the spotlight, the next step is to monetize it, paving the way for Retail Media, a trend led globally by Alibaba and Amazon, with 80 billion dollars in advertising revenue by 2022. In this model, the big retail e-commerce platforms become publishers, offering media inventory and data intelligence to generate better targeting for more effective brand activations within their websites, apps, marketplaces, social networks and Connected TV.
But you might be wondering why brands are keeping an eye on retail media inventory? According to e-Marketer data for Latin America, 45% of consumers go straight to retail e-commerce to make purchases rather than searching online (vs 31%). This means a change in the consumer buying journey, where retail channels are gaining relevance and therefore tending to attract more investment, whether for brand-building campaigns or even performance. Seen as the third wave of digital advertising, Retail Media is expected to generate more than US$1.6 billion by the end of 2025, according to e-Marketer.
4- Data Clean Room and the combination of data with privacy controls
But the great truth is that brands don’t just want to use their data to impact customers, they also want to use retail data, and they need to combine it within a much stricter data privacy control scenario. This brings the need for a complementary infrastructure, another trend, Data Clean Rooms. DCRs are an infrastructure that allows data to be shared and collaborated on securely, for advanced analysis between advertisers and vehicles and with guaranteed protection of consumer data.
5- Connected TV and the expansion of media inventory
Today, all entertainment ends up on a connected screen (tablet, cell phone or TV). Smart TVs took almost 10 years to become popular and gain significant penetration in homes. The expansion of broadband internet has also been fundamental to the scenario we have today. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the growth of streaming subscriptions — by 2022, 43% (or 31 million) of households had a paid streaming service, according to IBGE. And now we’re seeing the movement towards free channels with media spaces (or FAST — Free Ad Supported TV).
With more connected screens, we have an expansion of the media inventory to be exploited, promising to give advertisers a good shake-up in their media mix. And because it’s a digital medium, we’ll have more data to work with: segmentation, precision and data collaboration. And measurement will be key to evaluating the channel’s efficiency.
This theme then brings the opportunity for brands to seek ever greater investment efficiency, with MTA (multi touch attribution), Lift, Experimentation and MMM (Marketing Mix Modelling) projects, to better understand the consumer journey, as well as the contribution that each medium makes to conversion and sales.
Digital marketing trends for 2024 point to a future that is increasingly personalized, efficient and based on data. Brands that adapt to these trends will have a significant competitive advantage. And with the constant changes in this ecosystem, brands need to always be aware of the latest trends and innovations to ensure they are at the forefront.
Is your company prepared to deal with all these trends? ;)
Profile of the Author: Mariana Fleury | Graduated in Social Communication from PUC-Rio, with an MBA in Business Management from FGV. I’m a Business Analytics Manager at DP6, passionate about solving my clients’ business problems using data.
